March 18, 2024
“Your assignment is simple: you must sell something. It can be something you make, something you buy and re-sell, or something you provide. In other words, you must sell a product or a service to pass the mid-term exam.”
I paused before continuing.
“One last thing—you cannot sell it to someone you already know.”
With that, the test had begun. The students had two weeks to earn a passing grade by acting out the central drive of entrepreneurship. Leading up to this assignment, we had talked extensively about the three primary steps involved: first, you paint the problem for the customer; second, you demonstrate the solution to the problem; third, you create value in the exchange. While simple in nature, these steps are incredibly important.
It is a common mistake among entrepreneurs to fall so much in love with the solution that they forget about the problem they set out to solve in the first place. To be successful, we must encourage students to fall in love with the problem because that is how they will connect most fully with their customers. And connecting with customers is key. We talk a lot, in educational circles, about the durable skills necessary to thrive in the next five to twenty-five years and at the top of the list is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is driven by empathy which, as Brené Brown explains, is “feeling with people.” When we feel with people, we come to understand their world, and this makes us better at solving the problems that affect their world. In other words, by teaching students to think like entrepreneurs, we are giving them real-time experience creating empathy in their dealings with customers.
We are also helping them understand the profound concept of value proposition. Everything in life stems from exchange. We exchange our time for money and if we want more money, we either exchange more time or make ourselves so valuable that our time is worth more money. When we go to spend that money, we are exchanging not just currency but the minutes of our lives that we traded to get that currency. And we want as much value for that currency as possible. This understanding at the core of the value proposition helps our students know that in selling a product or service, they must promise that the value the customer is receiving is equal to or greater than the cost. If we set out to rip off our customers and cheat them with inflated pricing or flimsy products, we are stealing not only their money but also the life they exchanged for that money. It’s a tall order and helps us work to create as much value as possible for the customer in the exchange.
And yet, it is a concept our students gravitate toward. This assignment gets them out of their comfort zone and requires them to think outside the box. And occasionally, it motivates them to go all in. Moments before the class started where I was going to explain this assignment to the students, I was approached by Marcus and Nate, previous students of mine who proceeded to tell me that after they did the assignment last year, they teamed up to find a business they could feasibly run while in high school (they are current sophomores) and they tried everything from a vending machine business to Amazon drop-ship until landing on the winner: professionally cleaning garbage cans.
“Mr. Carter,” they said excitedly, “We made over $300 last weekend!”
Seeing their excitement, I put them on the spot immediately and had them share their story with the thirty-five students in the class. They talked about going door to door, they shared the problem of dirty trashcans and explained the smell and the health concerns, and they painted the picture of the problem solved. And they did something much bigger: they demonstrated, in real time, that entrepreneurship is not something that requires a lot of startup money or a fancy degree to do. Entrepreneurship is as simple as borrowing your dad’s pressure washer (hopefully with his permission) and getting a few cleaning supplies before knocking on doors and offering a service (though I did point out that it is best to knock on doors with a partner or two).
Robert Vera from Grand Canyon University shared with me a statistic from his research that 60% of high school students want to be entrepreneurs. And yet most schools don’t have any programming in place to feed into this desire. I’ve anecdotally noticed a decline in the number of lemonade stands I see run by younger children in the summer—kids just aren’t selling any more. Sure, the world has changed and times are different than they were years ago, but people remain the same. We still have problems, and we still crave solutions and we all desire value and when those things come together, we create entrepreneurial magic. And, in my humble opinion, the learnings that will come from this assignment far outweigh any traditional test.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Stephen Carter for Intrepid Ed News.
